ThinWire for AJAX development

19 January 2010, 9:21 am

ThinWire is an AJAX platform I’ve only fairly recently discovered, and feel unlike many others, worth a mention. The trouble with many AJAX platforms is that they tend to not offer a full package in terms of customisation and extensibility. My current favorite is GWT-Ext for its sheer versatility due to the server side code being pure Java and the client side Java that is converted into JavaScript. This offers much more scope than manipulating JavaScript directly or some new intermediary language.

What ThinWire does is push everything out to the server side code, which is written entirely in Java. There is no conversion of Java into JavaScript, the view the user gets is simply handled entirely by some server side code. This seems to me not a terrible model as your user interface can still be contained in a separate .jar than the main application logic to stop the wrong code bleeding into both. Additionally one can presumably use all features of the Java language as the UI components are simply Java classes all the way through. There seems to be a reasonably extensive library of visual components. Like GWT-Ext the UIs created with the ThinWire AJAX platform are event-based. The only downside seems to be that the project hasn’t been updated with new features for sometime, though bug fixes appear to still be being released.

Still if the whole package is essentially all Java, there shouldn’t be anything stopping a user extending the thing themselves for their own purposes. The key ‘selling’ point of it is the pushing of the code responsible for the client side view out to the server.